VOLUME 11, NUMBER 1 A JOURNAL FOR THE THEOLOGY OF CULTURE
there’s a consolidation of power and where there’s isolation. It’s not like this
is a cure-all, but they said, “The longer we live this way, the less violence
happens in the first place.” And it’s because the structures are put in place
that make violence less of a thing that people think to do. In our society, we
all have these violence intervention programs concerned with what to do
after the violence has occurred. But they’re suggesting you could structure
your world differently, so that you stop being violent in the first place. By
having these different structures, they’re able to be different. They’re able to
imagine a different world in that process.
Also, I think that what this suggests is we need to put together innovations
for structural change at the same time that we look at how existing structures
impact us individually, because so many times we put the two apart. If we
want to protest, we’ll get together and publically march on the streets. But if
you have a personal problem, go see a therapist. And, of course, because
you’re not actually all that “together,” when you come back to the
movement, you mess it up with all your dysfunctional behaviors. But there’s
no place to talk about it because that’s something you do on your own time.
And when you go to your therapist, what you learn is how you can put a
Band-Aid on your problems till you can learn to live in an unjust society, and
not how you can heal within the context of creating a just society.
So how do we put the two together? I just want to mention one book, by Dian
Million. She’s a Native scholar and the author of Therapeutic Nations,3 in
which I think she does a great critique of this as it’s impacted Native
communities—but I think it has broader implications as well. She’s talking
about the fact that there are all th ese government programs that are about
healing Native communities, but they’re never about decolonizing Native
communities. It’s always about, how can we heal you within the current
system? It never asks, what system led you to be hurt in the first place, and
can we change that system itself?
Another group I was mentioning was the Boarding School Healing Project.
This is a group that is trying to get justice for boarding school survivors. But
it’s centered on healing in that work, because in my experience, as we started
to do workshops for boarding school survivors, people would literally drive
two hundred miles—though they had a hard time getting gas, and they were
in very rural areas—and not be able to walk through the door because of that
trauma. And that’s when we learned that we can’t just develop a movement
around an idealized vision of who we are. We have to build movements
3. Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human
Rights (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2013).
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